Prospect: A Year in the Park

Divine drug

As a little girl fond of 1,500-piece jigsaw puzzles, I used to fantasize that I could disappear into those impossibly lush and complex fields of flowers. Yesterday, I did, here outside the Litchfield Villa. The blue-shirted figure (whose puzzle pieces could be confused with the small chunk of blue sky) is Carmen, the prodigious and visionary volunteer gardener of this miraculous hillside along Prospect Park West.

When I researched the villa, I found no evidence that its gardens were ever this glorious even in its Gilded Age heyday. Grace Litchfield, the lady of the house, and her railroad baron husband Edwin, would surely be proud (although they may still resent eventually losing the mansion to the park that was built around it).

I asked Carmen if she had planted every one of these bulbs. "Oh yes," she answered. "It makes me feel alive!"

The tulips are the brasses in this ensemble, but note some subtle woodwind harmony from these bluebells.

Next fanfare will come from the fence's crown of clematis, but even their buds are lovely, like delicate pursed lips about to speak.

If I wax poetic, it's because today is Poem in Your Pocket Day. Here is one to pocket in honor of Carmen: 

The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,

whose hands reach into the ground and sprout

to him the soil is a divine drug.  He enters into death

yearly, and comes back rejoicing.  He has seen the light lie down

in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.

What miraculous seed has he swallowed

That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth

Like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water

Descending in the dark?

   Wendell Berry, The Man Born to Farming

 

The greening time

Ha-ha! Proof that Spring is late this year: This photo was taken one year ago today. And while I wasn't over to the woods by the East Drive today, there is no way that anyplace in the park is this green yet. Not after last week's interminable string of rainy-in-the-40s days.

But tomorrow...all hell will be breaking loose. Three days in the 80s...and I will be cooped up inside all weekend. It's a great event, an annual conference I love, but of all the weekends to be not in the park...

So go out there and fling yourself down into Spring in my absence this weekend. It will get greener while you watch.

Apres le deluge, moi

You know how it is after days of rain: You probably shouldn't come out yet, but you just need a good stretch.

This wormie on the Parade Grounds was fully the length of my size-10 ladies' sneaker, even while not fully extended, which means that if he grows at all, he will need to shop at the Big'n'Tall Worms Shop. I placed him considerately on some grass, where he had a better chance of rethinking his asphalt compulsion and making a meal for one of the countless yodeling robins nearby.

It was one of those Prospect Park walks that coalesced around no particular theme other than random cool stuff, starting with this school project abandoned inside one of the little colonnaded shelters at the Park Circle. You could really see the logic ticking: I got my grade, what'm I gonna do with this thing anyway, and my buddies want to go play. Screw it. But...it's cool enough that I'll prop it here for display. I can't quite figure out the theme of the diorama; it may be a cross between a farm and an ampitheatre.



This magnolia was the cover girl for my calendar last year; here it is looking east instead of west, with a haze of spring green in the distance. Yesterday's beating rain was brutal on petals.

But it was even harder on this old willow. The damage was so fresh that you could smell the sap in the torn trunk.  An egret hung out on the fallen branches.

Right next to the real lake, a duck enjoyed the privacy of his own boutique lake in this vast puddle.

Pictures, moving and otherwise

Yesterday was yet another in April's Interminable Winter Series, with a raw breeze blowing off the lake and making the magnolias shiver.

The woods on Lookout Hill were full of song, although a woodpecker and countless robins were the only ones I saw besides the cardinal.













These finely engineered catkins sprouted from a tree on Wellhouse Drive that had fallen but not given up. Overall, though, spring seems slow and muted; tomorrow's anticipated 70-degree sunshine should unleash pandemonium.

 

Speaking of Wellhouse Drive and Lookout Hill, here's an amazing find on E-bay: an ancient stereoview card showing the 1869 Wellhouse (still there, now used as a storage shed) with its original tower (demolished in the 1930s, according to Forgotten New York) and peaked entry hood, with the well itself in front. Note that there are practically no trees cloaking the hill behind it. Bidding is through the roof on this rare glimpse of a raw young Prospect Park; wish it could be mine.

YouTube, Ebay...if Frederick Law Olmsted were alive today, he (unlike me) would be tweeting on Twitter!

Birdhouse in your soul

I snapped this delightful scene last month through the fence of Green-Wood Cemetery; the quixotic hope that emanates from that little birdhouse seemed a good fit with today's Easter Vigil, when we await the impossible with open hearts.

It also seemed an apt metaphor for the emergence of a few tendrils of hope that the late lamented Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment will be able to coalesce and continue its mission in some other form. Here is a communication I received from the peerless urban guide and historian Ruth Edebohls:

Thank you for your lovely and heartfelt sentiments. I was John Muir's administrative assitant for over 8 years until his retirement and first met him on those tours you mention. I remember well the Underground Brooklyn tour and John's noshing tours - they introduced me to BCUE and to John. For the past 5 years or so I was BCUE/CUE's Coordinator of Urban Tours and I planned and scheduled those weekend tours you remember so well. I was with the Center for 15 years - about half of its life - and I mourn its demise. Bob Guskind came along on the Last Gowanus Cruise we held in June and filmed a great video that was on the Gowanus Lounge. I got to meet and know Bob through the Center and contributed historic articles to his blog. He was always supportive and enthusiatic about my work and I was blessed to have known him. March has been a very sad month. I'd love to keep the Urban Tours alive in some form. Green-Wood Cemetery has asked me to continue the tours I did for BCUE/CUE for them. I hope to be doing one on Mother's Day, May 10th - The Great Women of Greenwood. A small effort to keep some of the spirit of an organization which I loved alive.

AYITP will keep you informed of any BCUE-renascent developments, just as surely as the soul will return to its birdhouse.

Magnificat

On Daughter's first day of Easter vacation, we skipped the park and headed here, to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, because we suspected this sort of thing was happening on Magnolia Plaza.

I don't think they have ever been this riotously gorgeous. People were stumbling around in a magnolia-drugged haze, nuzzling blossoms, taking cell-phone pictures, and just gazing into the spring sky. The breeze smelled like perfumed French soap.

There are pink ones, a few glowing buttery yellow ones, and snowy-white ones, their black branches a spare and elegant contrast.












We had lunch, bought some seeds (chervil, marigolds, black-eyed susan vine) and then headed back to the magnolias via Daffodil Hill, still at peak. Daughter objected violently when I could not resist humming Lara's theme from Dr. Zhivago and swanning about like Julie Christie.

In the Fragrance Garden, I solved a lifelong mystery: Since violets don't have any smell, where do they get violet perfume? The answer: I've been smelling the wrong kind of violets. These ones, aptly named viola odorata, emit a cloud of that elusive and haunting bouquet. I have never been to Paris, but I'm told that bunches of them are sold there on the street.

Ghostbridge

Prospect Park must once have been the DisneyWorld of its day, judging from how many "stereopticon" or magic-lantern slides that pop up on E-bay. (Shown is half of one; you put them in an ancestor of today's 3-D glasses and marveled at the Scenic Views.) Some of the views remain familiar; others evoke a ghost park of vanished romantic structures.

Like this bridge, with its hoop-skirted observers leaning over the railing. No current park bridge looks like this, so I asked Park archivist Amy Peck for help. Mystery solved: It's "Lullwood Bridge," the predecessor to today's Lullwater Bridge opposite the Boathouse/Audubon Center.

According to Ms. Peck, it was a 90-foot span bridge of white oak finished in 1870. "I'm not sure why it was replaced relatively quickly," she adds, "but by 1885 the report to the Brooklyn park commissioners is referring to its replacement." The bridge is barely visible at middle left in this photo from The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted Vol. VI, but across the lake you can clearly see another ghost: the old wooden boathouse, standing opposite the site of today's Audubon Center. (I also love the wooden gardener's basket plunked in the foreground.)

Photo, right: Courtesy of Prospect Park Archives

And here is today's Lullwater Bridge, a single steel arch with stone abutments. This archivey goodness has been brought to you by the weather, which is gray, cold, windy, and thoroughly disappointing, causing me to boycott the park because I am sick, sick, sick of wearing gloves and a hat.

Intellectual Property Wonk Note: Fellow IPWs are invited to weigh in on the ethics of using a non-watermarked E-bay image, as I have done above with the magic-lantern slide. I would have linked to the auction but it has elapsed. The image itself is of course public domain, but the physical slide is the property of...whoever won the auction, and was the property of the E-bay seller at the time I downloaded it. I'm not using the image for commercial purposes (well, not yet, anyway). Those not afflicted with the sin of scrupulosity would just pretend they owned the damn slide themselves (there were undoubtedly hundreds produced), or would not care, but I am picky. It's Holy Week; what do you think, have I sinned against the copyright gods?

Caught in the devil's bargain?

According to this report, there is serious talk of using Prospect Park's Long Meadow this summer to stage a concert in celebration of the 40th anniversary of that tediously revered mudfest now known as Woodstock. Apparently, when it comes time to "get back to the garden," we've got an even bigger one than Central Park.

Oh, goodie! At left: Just a reminder of what that might look like. (It gets worse: The promoter threatens to bring on the taxidermied remains of Crosby, Stills, Nash and No-Longer-Young.)  I suppose the very-worst-case scenario is not a redux of naked, overdosing neo-hippies, but a sea of tie-dyed Boomers sucking back vitamin-enhanced bottled water and organic yummies and groovin' before their horrified young...

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get our selves
Back to the garden

                   "Woodstock' Joni Mitchell  © Siquomb Publishing Company

Images: Top: from Peacefence.com, where you can get a pendant made from the "actual 1969 Woodstock Festival Fence," raising some interesting earned-income possibilities for our Parks Department...
Bottom: David Crosby Fans

RIP, BCUE

This is the Tennis House in Prospect Park, once the hangout for genteel lawn tennis players in 19th-Century Brooklyn and from 1988 until last year, the home to a wonderful organization known as BCUE, or Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment. Yesterday came unfortunate news (via Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn): BCUE has suddenly and rather mysteriously ceased to exist. Even their website is down, and thus a deeply valuable Brooklyn institution seems to have vanished without a trace.

The group had come a long way from their 1978 beginnings as the Prospect Park Environmental Center, or PPEC...perhaps too far. Last year they shed "Brooklyn" from their name and left the park for a new "green" building near the Gowanus, the latest phase in their evolution from a spunky local advocacy group to a big-time nonprofit educational enterprise. The story behind their closing has yet to emerge, but it's regrettable that their ambitious plans went so badly awry, denying the borough and the city an irreplaceable resource.

Spouse and I loved PPEC/BCUE, especially back in our newlywed Park Slope days, as we explored our new neighborhood via their amazing walking tours. We went bird-watching with the delightful John Irizarry, took a cruise along the Gowanus Canal, traipsed through Green-Wood Cemetery, and poked around the coast of Brooklyn by boat, spotting cormorants perched on rotting docks and learning all the history they never teach you in school. 

But our favorite trips were led by the group's founder, the charismatic John Muir (yes, a distant relative of the famed naturalist). Like ducklings, we followed jaunty John on an unforgettable tour of "Brooklyn's Secret Places" (including a cave under the Litchfield Villa that no one else seems to know is there) and a gloriously gluttonous "noshing tour" that ranged from a Norwegian deli in Bay Ridge to a Jamaican bakery in Crown Heights. Muir's enthusiasm for the mashup of city streets, wildlife, botany, cultures and history that was Brooklyn inspired and delighted us, and his passion for exploration is a direct inspiration for Prospect: A Year in the Park. For a nice Daily News interview with John, who retired from BCUE about 7 years ago, go here.

Given BCUE's founding in the city's darkest days, it seems ironic that the latest fiscal crisis may have given them the coup de grace. In 2007, according to Atlantic Yards Report:

John Muir, founder of the Prospect Park Environmental Center (PPEC) recalled how, the park “was absolutely scraping the bottom of the barrel in the mid- to late-1970s.” The whole park seemed to be dying, as it was full of derelict buildings used by squatters or shirking parks workers. “But this park—you could see its magic, behind the deterioration. It was a world-class park.”... Muir recalled that the police, who were typically reactive rather than deterrent, thought the parks advocates were nuts. Most locals were asking for the park foliage to be decreased, not increased, since it allegedly served to hide miscreants. The activists began a dialogue with the parks department and agitated for more money for staff and trees. The PPEC started in 1977, “on a wing and a prayer,” during the depth of the civic crisis, when New York was nearly bankrupt. The group organized school trips and public walking tours.

Now the Park is a renovated gem, but BCUE is gone, from the park and from existence. The news came hard on a day when many of us in the Brooklyn blogosphere gathered to remember, with great warmth and affection, another intrepid explorer and advocate of Brooklyn's battered and beautiful environments: the late Bob Guskind of Gowanus Lounge. His memorial service at the Brooklyn Lyceum was a testament to the allure of our home town and the power of one individual to make it a better place. I will miss BCUE, and I will miss Bob.

Out like a...hawk

I can't remember if March came in like a lion or a Thompson's gazelle or what, but it went out like a lamb, which would have made a tasty meal for this raptoriffic guy atop one of the Cobra-head streetlamps on Wellhouse Drive. He was easy to spot if you're an ace birder like me: Just look for real ace birders standing around with long telephoto lenses, looking up. Bird identification is easy for us experts, too: Eavesdrop alertly until you hear a long-lensed person say something like, "Juvenile red-tail, that's why his tail isn't red yet."

After indulging his paparazzi for awhile, he (or she?) hung out low in a nearby tree, grooming breast feathers and scratching an itch with one taloned foot. This "juvenile" looked to have a slouchy paunch, belied by that screamin' evil eye that says, "You. I'll bet your soft parts would make a decent snack." This shot is no match for the telephoto-endowed, but it's my best hawk shot ever!

Other things of note: Magnolias busting out of their fuzzy coats near the Vanderbilt playground...

...and the tree shadows (still skeletal) now fall on soft green grass instead of sere stubble.

Today marked "One and a quarter years in the park." I've slacked off a bit in visit frequency, but am loving the idea of making AYITP more collaborative. Thanks to those who've already contributed some great stuff. The rest of ya: Bring on the photos, artwork, writing, archivey goodness, video or whatnot, in or about Prospect Park, and we'll share the journey.